Winter Daze

They've drawn down the level in Roosevelt Lake, lower than I've ever seen it, and the mud banks are ugly, the ducks confused. Maybe they intend to scrape the swimming area and replace sand, maybe there's a crack in the dam, maybe the Army Corp of Engineers, in their infinite wisdom, have plans against a swollen Mississippi. Maybe they know something we don't. Cold last night and I couldn't get a good fire banked, so it was even colder this morning and I stayed in bed late, with the covers over my head (so I missed first light, my usual alarm clock) and didn't have time to build a good fire again. Compounded error. Finally just braved the cold and shaved, grabbed a coffee and left for work. The lake stopped me dead. Probably because it's drained down and not as deep, but forever what reason, it was iced over. I had to stop and play, poke it with a stick, throw rocks. A Park Ranger stopped in the parking lot, watching me, I thought I might get busted for throwing rocks. I'd found that if I threw a high fly with a palm-sized rock it would break through the ice with a satisfying sound and a nice little geyser. Amusing myself. I sometimes feel that I'm circling around an imagined center point, poking at the boundaries, testing viscosity. Partly just engaging the natural world, but also scratching for a meaning that might be plausible to me. I'm a simple empirical person: I need to poke things. I was always that kid that put his tongue on a frozen flag-pole, but smart enough to spray it first with WD-40, which worked, as far as the sticking (I made several dollars) but was awful because WD-40 is transdermal and smells like garlic. If you ate a head of garlic every day for a week, the way your body would smell, out-gassing, was what my tongue tasted like for a week. I'm a student of labels, collect really strange ones, and the yearly Hospital party is at the museum tomorrow night. Jennifer is the coordinator, and I've worked with her before, she's easy to work with, and she's been preparing for this party for months. A lot of the stuff she and helpers bring in is in the original packing, but some things, odd lots, needed a box, so there were some odd boxes, and it's a hospital. The last time this happened to me, I actually took delivery of some body parts, so I'm careful what I sign for. And there was a box, completely full of blue xmas balls to fill a vase as a table decoration (the shit I have to put up with) and in bold sans-serif, a fucking label that said EMPTY EVACUATED CONTAINER. I want this box, I'm pretty sure I can steal it and substitute another. There aren't many things I covet. It takes me hours to figure out what it means, just what it says. Then I feel like an idiot. That I didn't see it immediately. Closed circles develop a common language. You need words for things. Naming. I always look to the trades or to sports, where a header might be two different things; meaning floats, there has to be a context or there is no referent. This printer problem, the Deputy finally addressed directly, ordered me a new printer, I'm paying, just that she did it, falls back into this whole family thing. For two weeks I've not read myself before I've written. I hadn't realized how important that was. You know, the ongoing story, what I thought I was saying.